Injured body parts have conventionally been treated by first removing foreign material and other unnecessary material from the injured part, then disinfecting with a disinfectant or the like and covering the injured part with a wound dressing or the like appropriate for treatment in order to achieve self-regeneration of the skin through cell proliferation. However, self-regeneration of skin is plagued with such intractable problems as time-consuming healing, the occurrence of infections in the injured part and the like.
In order to solve these problems, the method of tissue autotransplantation has recently been applied as a form of regenerative medical engineering, whereby cells near the injured part are collected and proliferated in vitro, and the desired tissue or organ is reconstructed outside the body and returned to the defection. Examples relate to a cell culture system comprising a container for cell proliferation medium and a wound dressing material system (for example, Japanese Patent KOHYO Publication 2001-507218), a cultured skin substitute comprising human fibroblast cells and a product effective for wound treatment (for example, Japanese Patent KOKAI Publication No. 2002-200161) and the like. These methods are all effective when applied to flat tissues, but various problems remain to be solved, including the difficulty of culturing multiple layers of cells (for example, multiple layers of cells including epidermal cells and dermal cells) and the slow speed of cell proliferation.
In the case of thick tissues, moreover, the cell take rate is not particularly high due to the different tissue structures of cells in the body and the difficulty of supplying oxygen or nutrients because of the lack of blood vessels. In addition, there are difficulties in the case of tissues and injured parts with complex three-dimensional solid structures, and it is impossible to prevent infections from occurring during treatment, so problems which existed in the past still remain to be solved.
With the foregoing in view it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a tissue cell culture system for regenerative medical engineering whereby a cell tissue can be efficiently and quickly proliferated on an injured part or in other words in vivo, and whereby the occurrence of bacterial infections in the injured part can be avoided during treatment.
In order to solve the aforementioned problems, the present inventor perfected the present invention as a result of exhaustive research when he discovered that it was possible to efficiently and quickly regenerate the tissue of a defection in situ by first removing necrotic tissue and other unnecessary material from the opening of the defection, embedding a bioabsorbable material in the defection space as a foundation for cell proliferation, closing the defection from the outside and circulating a solution appropriate for cell culture in the closed space.